


A Dream (Is it Boring if We Walk this Way Again?)

by thatsrightdollface



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Character Study, Dream Sequence, I'm Sorry, M/M, Post-Game, Spoilers, identity crisis, self-indulgent dream imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 09:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12702258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Shuichi has been having a recurring dream, lately.  Kokichi is in it, and so are many dark and tangled roads.





	A Dream (Is it Boring if We Walk this Way Again?)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey!! I hope you enjoy this if you read it, and I’m sorry for any mistakes I made~ Have a good day!

If every action of Kokichi Oma’s – every manic tyrant’s smile, every heartbroken confession –  _could_  have held a piece of his truth, it made sense that when Shuichi dreamt about him after it was all over he usually ended up dreaming of roads.  Roads meant possibilities; roads meant contradictions and choice.  These particular roads wound through dark places, a liar’s tangled highways where there was no way to know how to make your way home. 

Kokichi had spun a desperate web for everyone, defying some of his own self to try and beat Monokuma’s killing game.  To become what he thought he needed to be.  Talking to him was a dizzy, wandering thing, like being very lost without a map.  That feeling lingered, even after he hadn’t talked to Kokichi for a long, long time.

They had been something a little like close, once.  As close as anyone could get to a person who hid so completely behind threat-games and the knowledge that nobody would let themselves believe anything he said completely.  Kokichi had offered to teach Shuichi how to hold people squirming in the palm of his hand, and somehow mysteriously tied with him at rock-paper-scissors a hundred times in a row.  He had tried to make a myth out of himself.

But he had died, in the end, just as fragile as anyone else.  Bam.  Gone.  Not a specter, not an untouchable shadow king mastermind, but just a person like the rest of them.  Kaito told all those stories about Kokichi wanting to stop the killing game, about him sobbing and maybe –  _probably?_  – wearing his heart plastered dripping on his sleeve in the end.  He’d said it was an act, wanting to hurt people.  It could’ve been he truly thought he could outwit the game itself, and when he thought about it that way Shuichi knew he would be haunted by Kokichi for a long time.  Maybe forever.  This guy who remembered running a gang of harmless jokester clowns, pulling nonviolent pranks to keep the world on its toes…  This guy who cast himself as a villain so terrible he’d leave everybody else in a despair more powerful than the killing game itself.  This guy who may have died not really knowing if anyone in the school considered him a friend. 

Kokichi’s kindnesses and cruelties were like two sides of a swaying scale – he’d hurt Gonta, he’d hurt Miu, but all of it, maybe, for a reason.  Maybe he'd given everything he had until he was splattered and unrecognizable, just bloody pulp that couldn’t stand, or grin wickedly, or even open his eyes.  Maybe he only wanted to seem cold as the slick white straitjacket that had been chosen for him, unfeeling as his voice got sometimes.  He might have wanted to troll his classmates in far, far different ways, if they’d been thrown into another sort of reality show.  Thinking about a world where he was the Ultimate Detective in a dance-off or cake baking special was almost enough to make Shuichi laugh about the fucked up shit that had happened to them all.  Almost, but not quite.

Shuichi knew his own self was fake, some jerk’s OC coded into his brain.  Making his meat into a stranger’s organic machine.  Sure.  And yeah, Kokichi and all the others were just as unreal.  Someone had wanted to become him, a supreme leader of clowns, a tiny snickering prankster king.  A maybe-friend.  A sort of-scoundrel.  A lie.  Someone might have wanted all his twisting roads and mismatched truths for their very own.  That someone could’ve thought it was hilarious that the sense of feeling lost in all Kokichi’s words, in all his possibilities, stuck with Shuichi so long after the body he’d sold away had died. 

_Kokichi_  might’ve thought it was funny, at least, whoever had worn his skin before him. He’d always said he wanted to turn Shuichi’s eyes towards him, and now that Shuichi couldn’t see him anywhere he wouldn’t have wanted to look away. 

Shuichi could almost hear him laughing, cocking his head mockingly to the side.  Sizing him up with eyes as simultaneously chilly and sticky sweet as grape popsicles.  “Aw, and I bet you’re the kind of guy who hates leaving the morning crossword puzzle unsolved, too, aren’t you?” Kokichi might have said.  “I guess you’re gonna have to fill in nonsense words to make the lines add up on this one, though.  Sad for you, but sometimes cheating  _is_  the only way out!  …Time to let me go, I guess.”

Or maybe Kokichi would have let the emotion drain right out of his face, staring Shuichi straight in the eyes.  “You don’t believe me, even after what happened?” he might ask, voice hollow and catching a little in his throat.  “Aw.  I did everything I could to trick you, but I thought you’d know _why_ , now.”

Whatever Kokichi was – whichever roads led back to the messy human heart of him – Shuichi would have wanted to find out.  He’d been the Ultimate Detective for a while, after all.  Maybe he should have expected to be drawn to a human puzzle.  Would Kokichi truly have been willing to die with Gonta, even if it ruined his plans?  If Shuichi had agreed to team up with him, would he have spilled his whole scheme down at the Ultimate Detective’s feet?  The answers died with Kokichi, of course, and plenty of Danganronpa fan message boards had been trying to pick him apart for ages.  Maybe he would’ve wanted it that way, but something in how Kaito described the sloppy, frustrated moments leading up to his death made Shuichi think it might have disappointed him.  He hadn’t meant those secrets for the masses, after all.  Maybe crocodile tears were always, always different than tears of the dying. 

No matter how many other true-organic, honestly-lived personalities brushed his out in the “real” world beyond the Danganronpa TV show and its high school killing game, Shuichi’s over the top classmates stayed real to him.  They had felt and made choices, just like anybody else.  Kokichi’s eyes had really lit up like fancifully murderous carnival lights when he was messing with everybody.  He’d really chosen to write up a script book for Kaito to impersonate him after he’d stopped breathing, devoting so much of his bombastic, playful energy towards machinations no one would expect or understand.    

Shuichi imagined Kaito getting wild eyed and way too into one of those space simulations people took field trips to, sometimes.  He pictured Gonta looking disapprovingly at him whenever he thought about squishing a bug around his apartment. And when Himiko got her life together enough to hold a Harry Potter movie night, he ended up casting those impossible dead friends into Hogwarts houses without really meaning to.  Before he sorted his new classmates and coworkers, or even his own self.  Everyone except those two girls he was actually watching the movie with, of course.  Himiko could’ve been in Hufflepuff, maybe, or else some kind of Luna Lovegood-style Ravenclaw.  Maki was a Gryffindor if Shuichi had ever known one.  And...

And at first he’d thought Kokichi would be in Slytherin, obviously – a shoe-in, what with his whole Ultimate Supreme Leader thing – but then maybe that was too obvious.

"Come on, you know this one, don’t you?” Kokichi might have teased.  “Do you go the clear, straightforward route with me, or shouldn’t that way always be wrong somehow?  Honestly, I’m not even sure anymore.  I never read  _Harry Potter._   Didn’t have good enough trading card games, you know?” 

Point being, all those guys would probably stick with Shuichi forever.  He’d watched them struggle, and been afraid along with them, and of them, and one by one he’d watched most of them die.

Sometimes, it was nice to dream about Kokichi.  Like coming home in a way, waking up in that terrible dorm to the obnoxious chime of the morning announcement, before he knew his friends would end up buried by strangers with names they never would have heard before carved into their tombstones.  Shuichi honestly wished he could forget he was somebody else’s daydream more often.  He had never realized how much he took “being real” for granted, before.

That night as he slept, he woke up in his stiff dorm bed.  The sheets clung to his feet, and diabolical teddy bears danced on the screen up in the corner of the room.  He stood, swaying, and brushed his teeth for a long time in the mirror.  There were dark, aching circles under his eyes that had finally faded, out in the real world.  When he smiled at himself in the mirror, he looked like the stranger he’d watched helping design his character in a video.  Not himself at all. 

Shuichi shook his head and took a shuddering breath.  The air smelled like Monokuma’s favorite air fresheners all mixed together into a terrible air freshener soup.  He didn’t remember getting dressed, but he  _must_  have because then he was out in the hallway.  It stretched an impossibly long way in both directions.  Rows and rows of faceless doors waited, some with blood seeping out from underneath.  Laughter drifted from behind others, and there was too much music everywhere.  Contradictory songs.  A rhythm no one could dance to.  Shuichi stumbled forward, and he knew without knowing that every door was going to be locked for him.  Kokichi, of course, could pick locks.

Finally, a cold hand slipped into his own and Kokichi said, “Well, _this_ is just the worst.  Right, Shuichi?  I’m so bored.  Are you going to take me home this time?”

“I can’t,” Shuichi said.  Kokichi didn’t have a house, or a clown gang called D.I.C.E., or a grave of his own.  How could Shuichi have any idea where he wanted to go?

And Kokichi looked at him with first something like rage and then something like love, or apology.  It was impossible to tell.  They were so far away, you see, except that they were hand in hand and squished up close together in a hallway that would probably have never ended.  Shuichi always suspected there were rooms full of what Kokichi liked, there – sodas and dangerous board games, Yu-Gi-Oh cards and weird spicy-sweet caramels.  He had never seen that stuff behind any of the doors, of course.  He just sort of knew.  Other rooms would have been torture chambers, maybe, and tyrannical make-believe city states, and the kinds of circuses where nobody’s bored but a lot of people end up dead.  How Kokichi had committed so completely to his role, even if it left him all alone in the universe, was something Shuichi thought about a lot in the waking world.  He never felt it would be right to ask, while he was dreaming.  He passed by all the rooms without saying a word about what was real and what probably, mostly, wasn’t. 

Sometimes Shuichi wondered if living this dream over and over meant he had loved Kokichi, in some way.  In whatever way.  They had been so busy trying not to lose themselves to Monokuma and his tricks, he’d never really given it much true thought.

Or maybe he was just trying to solve one last unsolvable mystery.  Just some douchebag’s obedient creation, trying to be the Ultimate Detective even when he knew he truly wasn’t.   

“It’s right through here,” Kokichi said, impatient.  He shuffled his shoes into the carpet, pouting in a way that really had to be calculated.  Or else he’d done it so many times even his real faces looked calculated, which was kind of sad, in its way.

And Shuichi said, “No, it isn’t.  It never is.”

But when Kokichi pulled him up to a door that was just another dark path, this one threaded with jutting roots and coiling underneath a sky without stars, Shuichi went.  He was almost glad to go.  People like them, people born ready-made into strangers’ skins, wouldn’t ever really find their way home.  He had gone to his friends’ graves with flowers, before, and stared at the false names printed above their pictures with an anger he wouldn’t have been able to put into words. _These flowers aren’t for you,_ he had thought.  _They are for someone you helped dream up, who died because you damned them._  

Kokichi would walk with Shuichi a little way, and then he would probably disappear.  Shuichi would be lost with the howling wind and rattling branches.  Things would shift all around him, and he’d keep on walking.  One way led into another way – that way, in turn, led into a hundred roads beyond.  He’d wake up and have to remember who he was all over again. 

There was once a boy whose heart was a tangle of dark roads and unopened doors.  He may have been real, or maybe not.  Some of what he said – those roads, you see, all fairy tale forests and a diabolical smile too old for his face – may have cut to the core of him.  He told the truth, sometimes.  He had loved his clown gang, and games, and keeping the whole world entertained.  He wore a checkered scarf, like a make-believe battle ground for tiny knights and horses carved out of ivory.  The whole world he was born for was a make-believe battleground, too, but he still bled like any living thing.

And there was once a detective that wasn’t a detective, who dreamt about wanting to know him.  If you asked Shuichi whether or not he minded – whether he missed Kokichi now that he had a chance to – he wouldn’t have lied to you.


End file.
